A Layperson’s Guide to the Scientific Literature - Part 1
May 19th, 2008
I’m back! I know that some of you will be disappointed by this, but I’ll try to not let your disappointment ruin my day. For the rest of you - it’s good to be back!I’ve been up to my eyeballs in writing for work and had no time to write for fun.Today, I’m starting a two-part series on how people who didn’t grow up to be “science geeks” can get in on the fun and play at home!
Note: A number of comments went into the electronic void as the result of me moderating comments when I should have been in bed. If your comment didn’t get posted, please send it through again. I promise that I won’t moderate when sleep-deprived again.
At least once a week, someone will ask me how a person lacking advanced education or training in the sciences can critically evaluate scientific literature. This comes up especially often from parents of autistic children who are trying to sort out the “wheat” from the masses of Internet chaff.
Well, the short answer is “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Frankly, critically evaluating the merits of a scientific publication requires not only an in-depth understanding of the specific field; it requires at least a passing familiarity with the journals, their editorial philosophy and the authors who publish in them.
For example, I can fairly easily evaluate the merits of papers published in the biomedical field, having spent all of my adult life either studying or working in the field. Even so, it can be hard for me to judge a study done in a part of biology or medicine that I am unfamiliar with – such as botany. I haven’t had much education in botany – apart from my undergraduate days – and I haven’t spent much time reading the botany literature, so I don’t know which journals routinely publish “iffy” papers and which authors routinely write them.
However – and there had to be a “however”, or this post would be utterly pointless – there are some things that the “layperson” can do that will help them tell if a scientific study – and its corresponding paper – have merit.
First step: Know Thyself
The first step to solving any problem, I am told, is to recognize that there is a problem. And the first step for any layperson who wants to evaluate the scientific literature is to recognize that they are a layperson and what that entails.
Everybody has their own unique mix of competencies and weaknesses. If you do not have an advanced degree (Google PhD’s don’t count) or extensive experience in a scientific field, science is probably not one of your special competencies. That’s not a bad thing, as long as you recognize it and act accordingly.
Problems with weaknesses usually happen when people fail to recognize them. The inherent weakness of a footbridge is not a problem unless you fail to recognize it and try to drive a truck across it. Likewise, a weakness in scientific knowledge is only a problem if you aren’t aware of it. I’ve seen people with tremendous competency in other, non-scientific, areas humiliate themselves (often without even being aware of that) by imagining that their skills in business (for example) somehow conferred on them the ability to understand science and medicine.
There is a component of relativity in this sort of hubris. These folks – MBA’s, lawyers, business people, actors, “Google PhD’s”, etc. – are probably more familiar with the science they think they know than is the “average” person. At the very least, they are more familiar with the words, the literature and a few of the “players” than the people they usually talk to.
This “greater knowledge” - relative to the people they associate with – may have led them to believe that they have a comprehensive grasp of the topic. This, in turn, has led some of them to think that anything they can’t understand is either baloney or unimportant. And this, in turn, has led them to thinking that they know more than the people who actually do know the subject.
I have to admit that I find it rather difficult to put myself in their position – that of imagining that I am an expert in a field where I have little or no education or training. And I suspect that it is a phenomenon limited to the sciences, as I don’t hear of too many people believing they have “special competency” in finance, business, plumbing or car repair. Perhaps that is because people who try to “play the expert” in those fields run up against the hard edges of reality more often – in the form of losses in the stock market, bankruptcy, leaky pipes and cars that won’t run.
On the other hand, only the most egregious examples of “playing the expert” in science will run afoul of reality. Apart from trying to ignore the law of Gravity – and certain critical and inescapable facts of human physiology – most science “wannabes” remain blissfully aware of their folly.
Another part of the problem is the general public’s conception of what “science” is. Too many people think that “science” consists of memorizing a long list of facts – the names of body parts, chemical elements, equations, etc. – and then applying that knowledge. This, unfortunately, is how “science” is taught in most high schools and – sad to say – in many undergraduate level college courses.
Real science is more like an “Indiana Jones” movie – it is the search for new knowledge, answering questions and solving problems. The “knowledge base” is important because it gives you the basic information you’ll need to formulate and answer the questions. It’s a tool to help in the search, not the goal. Real science is the process of finding pieces of new information that help us to understand the Universe a little better.
Bottom line: if you’re a novice at science – meaning that you don’t get paid to do it – acknowledge that fact and don’t pretend that you’re not.
Second step: Read the Article
You’d be amazed at how many people think that they know what a scientific paper is about without having bothered to actually read it. These folks have read (or heard) a summary of the paper (often by someone who knows as little about science as themselves) in the newspaper, a magazine or on the Internet. As anyone who has witnessed a newsworthy event and then seen it reported in the news can attest, it often loses something in the translation.
News articles and Internet summaries are a good starting point - they can help you wade through the masses of scientific articles that are published each day to find the ones that you’re interested in. But – and I can’t emphasize this enough – they are not a substitute for actually reading the original article.
Yes, sometimes it can be a real pain to get the article – especially if it’s been published in an obscure journal – but you cannot evaluate a study when you haven’t read the article. Check with your local library about inter-library loan. If you live near a university, especially one with a medical school, their library may have the journal. Even if you’re not a student or faculty member, almost all university libraries will let you look through their paper journals and – for a small fee – photocopy the article (or articles) you are interested in.
Anatomy of a Scientific Paper
Science writing has its own conventions and its own style. Although the individual journals may dictate certain deviations from the “standard” style, the “parts” described below will appear in all scientific articles. If one or more is missing, you may not be reading a scientific paper.
Abstract:
This is a very brief summary of the article written by the author(s). As such, it is very much like a first date – only the good things about the study are mentioned. My advice to you is to not read the abstract. Its function – in an ideal world – is to give people who are searching for articles a way of quickly determining if a specific article meets their needs. It does not necessarily give a complete or even accurate description of the study or its results.
Introduction:
The purpose of the introduction is to “set the stage” for the study. It should explain why the study was done and why the study is important. Most introductions give a brief (very brief!) capsule summary of what was known about the subject of the study and how the study was intended to increase this knowledge.
One good sign of a bad study is a very long introduction (relative to the total length). You can, in some ways, think of the introduction as an excuse. In most papers, it is a very brief “excuse” for spending time and money on the study. Like most excuses, the longer it gets, the more it is probably trying to “explain away”. Some of the worst papers I have read were all introduction – they were simply a means of trying to explain why bad data (or no data at all) should cause people to think a certain way.
On occasion you will find a long introduction in an article that covers two or more scientific disciplines. These interdisciplinary papers require more explanation and background in order that people who aren’t familiar with both (all) fields can understand why the study was done and what it was intended to do. With the rise of interdisciplinary journals, these sort of “introduction-heavy” papers are disappearing.
When you read the introduction, make a note (write it down!) of what the authors thought they were trying to accomplish. You will later compare this to what they actually accomplished – often a very different thing.
Methods:
In most journals, the “methods” section comes after the introduction, but some journals are different and put it at the end. Either place, the “methods” section explains – often in very terse and almost telegraphic language - how the study was done. This is where a lot of laypeople come to grief when reading scientific papers. If you don’t understand what the methods are – especially the statistics – you may completely miss major flaws (even “fatal” flaws) in a study.
Every study has flaws and limitations. Not every variable can be controlled and not every study can afford to be as thorough or complete as you might like. In some fields – especially those involving human subjects – the ethical and financial restraints make it extremely difficult to do good work.
Here are some things to look for in the “methods” section:
[1] Is there a control group?
In biology and especially in medicine, any treatment, intervention, exposure or risk factor has to be compared against a group – the control group – that is as similar to the test group as possible in order to counter random variations due to chance.
The control group should – ideally – be exactly like the treatment group except in the variable(s) being studied. Thus, a study looking at whether turnips cause terminal moraine needs to have a control group that is just like the group eating turnips, except that they don’t eat turnips.
Control groups are those parts of the method (see below) that act to check for errors and “contamination” (either physical or mental). For example, when I do PCR (polymerase chain reaction), I include a “positive control” (a sample that I already know should give me a “positive” result) and a “negative control” (a sample that I already know should give a “negative” result).
If the “positive control” comes out negative, I know that there was a problem in the procedure and that any negative results should be ignored. Likewise, if the “negative control” comes out positive, I know that there is contamination and that any positive results should be ignored.
[2] Is there a placebo control?
For treatment or exposure studies, where a something is done to the test group, the control group should receive a “placebo” in order to counter the tendency of the subjects and/or the observers to attribute changes to the treatment or exposure.
A placebo is a treatment or exposure that is indistinguishable (to the subjects and the observers) from the “real” treatment or exposure. If neither the subjects nor the observers know who is getting the “real thing”, there is less chance that a change will be erroneously attributed to the treatment or exposure.
Some studies can’t do a placebo control for either ethical reasons (it’s not ethical to do “sham” surgery on humans) or practical reasons. The reasons for not using a placebo control should be explained in the article and the limitations this caused should be discussed. If they are not, ask yourself, “Why not?”
[3] Group sizes should be large enough and roughly equal.
Biology is a field plagued by complexity and variation. For that reason, seeing something once – or even a few times – is not considered adequate. “Einmal ist keinmal!”, my PhD advisor was fond of saying – “Once is never!” Even a “statistically significant” finding can be a “statistical fluke”, since even the standard level for statistical significance allows a 5% chance that the results could be due to random chance.
One way to even out the “noise” in biological systems is to do the same test many different times (preferably on different subjects). The more subjects (human, animal, plant, etc.), the more the “noise” gets “averaged out” and the greater the ability to spot real differences between groups. Be especially wary of studies that use small numbers of subjects – it is very easy to get large apparent differences that are due entirely to chance.
One quick check is to calculate how results “translate” into numbers of subjects. For example, if a study had 13 rats treated with unobtainium and found that 15% of them developed cancer and 8% of the 13 control rats developed cancer, that might seem impressive. However, when you “run the numbers”, you find that they translate into 1 rat in the control group and 2 rats in the treatment group. If one subject can have such a large impact on the results, the vagaries of chance can easily create the false appearance of a difference.
[4] Are the statistics well-described and appropriate?
Statistics, as Disraeli observed, are very slippery things to the average person. Even mathematicians who specialize in statistics can disagree on which test or analysis is best or what their results mean. If you’re not familiar with statistics beyond “average” – if you can’t tell at sight the difference between mean, median and mode and don’t know what parametric and non-parametric statistics are – then you are at the mercy of the authors.
That said, some authors make the most amazing errors in their statistics – errors that anyone can find, if they know what to look for. Here are two of the most common:
[a] Are discrete variables treated as continuous (or vice-versa)?
OK, many of you might have no idea what that means – but it’s a relatively easy concept. Discrete variables are things that can only be measured in whole units – boxes, people, fish, etc. There is no such thing as 0.3 of a person, even though one study found that the “average” family had 3.3 people.
Continuous variables, on the other hand, can take any value along a scale. Things like height, weight, volume, voltage, sodium concentration, etc. One way to determine if a variable is continuous is to ask if it would make sense to have a value between any two values. For example – if one person is 58 inches tall and another is 59 inches tall, would it make sense if someone else were 58.5 (or 58.348573) inches tall? Of course!
On the other hand, if you’ve counted 58 bunnies and someone else counted 59 bunnies, it’s unlikely that anyone would ever count 58.5 bunnies (not live ones, anyway).
Warning: sometimes, things that seem like continuous variables can actually be discrete. A good example of this is my digital bathroom scale. Besides telling the most scurrilous lies, it can only register weight in multiples of one half pound. It shifts instantly from 134.0 to 134.5 pounds, with no indication that it even noticed all of the intervening weights.
Anyway, “average” and mean values are meaningless with discrete variables (for the “0.3 person” reason mentioned above) and serve only to point out that the authors don’t know what they’re doing with statistics. Median and mode values are acceptable for both discrete and continuous variables, although the mode is often rather pointless with continuous variables.
[b] Are they correcting for multiple comparisons?
In these data-mining days, it is very tempting for authors to amass vast mounds of data – or buy it from someone – and then go “digging” until they find a correlation that seems interesting. This has led to some very dramatic – although later very laughable – “correlations”.
The problem lies with the tests used to determine “statistical significance”. Without getting into the mathematical theory too deeply, they are simply probabilities. They give the probability that the difference between two (or more) groups could be due simply to chance – the probability that if you selected different subjects from the same groups (for example autistic vs non-autistic, treated vs untreated) that the difference would disappear.
The usual “cut-off” value for accepting that the difference is “probably real” is 5%. This means that we’re willing to accept a 5% chance that the difference is due to random events and not “real”.
What this means is that for every comparison made between two groups, there is a 5% that a “difference” will be found, even if the two groups are identical. If you make multiple comparisons between the same two groups, these 5% probabilities add up (actually, they multiply, but let’s not get all fussed about semantics). Here’s how it works:
2 comparisons – 9.8% chance of finding a “difference” where none exists
3 comparisons – 14.3% chance…
4 comparisons – 18.5% chance…
5 comparisons – 22.6% chance…
10 comparisons – 40.1% chance…
14 comparisons – 51.2% chance…
20 comparisons – 64.2% chance…
Fortunately, there is a way to correct for this problem. Either the Sidak or Bonferroni correction will adjust the probability cut-off limits for the individual tests so that the risk of finding a false association is below a certain limit, usually picked as 5%.
If multiple comparisons are made and there is no mention of a correction, assume that none was made and mentally adjust the “significance” of the findings downward.
Another problem is when multiple comparisons are made but only a few (or only one) are reported. Unless it is mentioned in the “methods” section, there is no way to pick up this “error” (it often seems to be done deliberately). Be suspicious when a large database is searched and one or a few “results” are reported.
Well, this looks like a good place to stop for now.
Next time: Results, Conclusions, References, Biases and the Profit Motive
Prometheus
Filed under: Autism Science, Critical Thinking
May 19th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Glad you’re back.
I’d add additional the recommendations of Google the author(s) & publication. In my experience, good research scientists (& physicians) tend to have a track record of well-regarded work and tend to publish in well-regarded, peer-reviewed journals. An author who appears to be publishing for purposes of litigation raises suspicions. And, even all peer-reviewed publications are not of equal quality, and a non-peer-reviewed journal is simply the author’s opinions, which haven’t been challenged by other experts. Even assuming that you can’t check and see how often the article has been cited in other professional publications, frequently there will be discussions of it in other articles available on-line or blogs (keep in mind that all bloggers have a point of view. Hence, any comments cannot be regarded as accurate or not reflecting a decided bias of the writer. However, if a criticism has merit, you don’t expect it to remain only a blog comment, but expect it to find its way into a respected professional publication — and that frequently results in the author or editor in the original publication making a comment either responding to the criticism, or clarifying a point). Eventually, even as a layperson, you get a feel for which authors, articles and contentions appear to have support, and which ones must be viewed with great skepticism.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
WFJAG,
Thanks for the welcome! It’s good to be back.
I’d substitute a PubMed/MedLine search for Google, just because it will weed out the innumerable website, link and ‘blog references to the author. MedLine is a “free” service (paid for by your tax dollars) and ONLY shows articles published in journals (although it DOES occasionally show abstracts from meetings, if they are listed in a journal).
I’m going to cover the issue of impact factor and other subtle pressures on journals in Part Two.
Criticism of an article in letters to the editor and even in editorials published in the same or different journals are all part of how controversy is handled in science. The RESPONSE of an author to criticism is often more revealing than their original article. Petulant, sarcastic and angry responses suggest - to me, at least - that the author isn’t very confident in their data or conclusions.
Thanks for the input - I’ll try to include a section on criticism and responses in Part Two (or maybe Part Three). What I will say now is that new hypotheses are ALWAYS criticized - it is how the authors RESPOND to criticism that tells how good the hypotheses are.
Good hypotheses respond to criticism with DATA - new data from new experiments or an explanation of how the old data answer the crisiticism. BAD hypotheses respond to criticism with character assassination and accusations.
Stay tuned!
Prometheus
May 19th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
Welcome.
As a layman, I do a Google (& Altavista & Yahoo) search before looking at MedLine. It gives me a feel for what the limits of the conclusions and any significant disputes may be, before looking at a much more trusted source. I’ll sometimes do this even before reading the article. Unlike many people, I have access to PubMed (and most of the leading medical journals), along with people who can and will answer my questions (provided I’ve done enough preliminary work so I don’t waste their time). Over time I have also developed a list of trusted blogs — yours is among them (which is one reason I’d very glad you’re back). I don’t consider trusted blogs to be authoritative. Rather, they are honest, at least to the extent that the blogger reveals his/her point of view, instead of trying to mask it, and raise legitimate questions.
You are absolutely right about an author’s responses being exceptionally important to judging credibility.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Even the scientists don’t know either, they either lack the cognitive capacity (and I have to say that is rare gift) or they lack memory or they lack logic or they lack the breadth of understanding not only of where they come from ontologically, but where they stand epistemologically, Rabelais notwithstanding.
Seriously I wrote something on this elsewhere, in that in medieaval times it was still possible to know all there was to know in those times and during the renaissance it was possible to be a renaissance man, but in these latter days the ignorance beyond the distinct and specialist fields that scientists find themselves in is almost beyond my ken.
I am the last of the renaissance men I think. I am really surprised at the simple lack of knowledge that so called scientists have of other “genres” they have not studied which predisposes a dangerous vacuum wherein the failure of critical thinking predisposes to the failings of human so called intuition in that they accept rather than think and investigate.
Ok I cannot play the piano, but at least I know where middle C is
May 19th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
[a] Are discrete variables treated as continuous (or vice-versa)?
That was exactly my primary criticism of Palmer et al. (2008). He thought urbanicity is discrete. But looking at the fairly clear correlation between population density and adm. prevalence of autism in California, it’s obvious there’s nothing discrete about it.
May 19th, 2008 at 9:52 pm
Wow, Prom - this is totally excellent. Thanks very much.
May 20th, 2008 at 6:20 am
A good example of this is my digital bathroom scale. Besides telling the most scurrilous lies, it can only register weight in multiples of one half pound.
Great post! Thanks for my morning laugh! Our bathroom scales must be related!
May 20th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Exactly what are your qualifications to pontificate on peer reviewed research?
A bibliography of your contributions to peer reviewed journals would be appreciated.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Dear Prometheus:
I’d also suggest a Part III — what is a “meta-analysis” and problems with those. Combining studies is an important and valid research tool. However, it frequently is not done properly, and if you don’t know which studies were included and which excluded, and the “why” for inclusion and exclusion, such combinations are highly misleading, or worse.
May 21st, 2008 at 6:44 pm
RAJ,
One of the liabilities of anonymity is that I cannot intimidate people with my reputation - my arguments have to stand or fall on their own merit.
If you don’t find my writings helpful, I suggest you look elsewhere.
WFJAG,
I’ll make a note of that - Part 3 is looking like a must-do.
Prometheus
May 21st, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Welcome back!
Great post, though I do have one slight disagreement, which does not detract from the overall goodness of the post.
Sham surgery is not always considered unethical. We recently reviewed a proposed sham surgery (that has been approved) at our institution in our monthly ethics conference. There are certainly more stringent constraints on when it is indicated, but sometimes sham surgery can be ethical.
Joe
May 22nd, 2008 at 6:31 am
Glad to see you back.
For reasons quite different from those of RAJ, I would be happy to look at your research some day - but I respect very much your reasons to stay anonymous.
A bit off-topic: I am using this post, and also “Arrogance of Ignorance” and “Age of Unreason”, in a series of posts trying to rebut a popular creationist book. It is titled “Has Science Buried God” and, in essence, tries to prove that it is the other way round. The author is a professor of mathematics and philosophy of science at Oxford University. Most people, hearing this, automatically conclude that he has the necessary expertise to judge scientific theories. They don’t realize that the above CV information can easily and legitimately be re-phrased as “a person with no documented education or training in science above secondary school level”. Sigh…
May 27th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
Maya M,
Thank you!
While I cannot send you my CV, I can tell you that I have two doctoral degrees in “biomedical-related” fields, as well as a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. I am employed at a medium-sized university in one of the United States. I have published a number of articles and book chapters.
Sorry, but that’s all I can give you and still maintain my anonymity.
Of course, since I am anonymous, I could be feeding you a line - I might be a spotty 13-year-old boy hunched over my computer, living out my fantasy life through the avatar of Prometheus.
In that case, you might also ask how a 13-year-old boy would know so much about biology.
I leave that decision up to you.
Prometheus
May 27th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
A lot of distilled experience and good sense in there, Prometheus. Will be directing some of my students towards the summary of how papers are constructed and analysed.
Couldn’t agree more about Steps One and Two, by the way - especially about the ability to see the limits of one’s own knowledge. I have written a bit about real and “Google” experts, and some people’s inability to tell the difference, here .
In some ways, I think steps one and two are interrelated, since many of the people who think they are experts but aren’t quite clearly don’t read the papers - in my opinion this is partly because trying to read it might light an inconvenient neuronal pathway flashing “I don’t really understand this”.
May 28th, 2008 at 8:51 am
Would you call Albert Einstein a ‘Google’ scientist? He published his four papers in 1905 while working as a patent clerk, unable to secure a position with any institute of higher learning..
Bill Gates, who dropped out of college, got his MBA from ‘Google University’.
You could heed Einstein’s advice when asked why he continued his research after being rejected by many institutes.. “I had a passionate resistance to the dogma of authority”.
No amount of advanced degrees and placements in repected academic research institutions can replace individual creativity and insight.
The indisputable fact about the ‘respectable’ autism research community is that they have failed the families.
The American Psychological Association has apparently recognized the fact. The APA has always deferred to child psychiatry and behavioral genetics as the ‘experts’ on autism. The Chair of the Working Group on Autism and PDD has always been a child psychiatrist, Edward Ritvo in 1987 (DSM-III-R) and Fred Volkmar in 1994 (DSM-IV). The APA has announced its working group on Autism and the PDD’s charged with recommending new diagnostic criteria for the 2012 edition of the DSM.
Instead of blindly defering to child psychiatry, the APA has taken a radical and surprising departure, announcing Dr. Susan Swedo as the Chair for the working Group on Autism and the PDD’s. Dr. Swedo is a pediatric neurologist whose area of research is in acquired autoimmune disorders and the association with neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism and the PDD’s.
It is a remarkable and welcome step in recognizing the failure of child pyschiatry and behavioral genetics and recognizes a growing change in the conceptualization of autism as a medical condition rather than a neuropsychiatric or behavioral condition.
May 28th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
RAJ,
Einstein, as you point out, did not receive a PhD - however, he DID receive a degree in Physics from the prestigious Swiss Federal Polytechnic School (ETH Zurich) that is roughly equivalent to the BS in US universities (although many would say it is more comparable to the MS). Beyond that, he was essentially “self taught”, although he had an excellent foundation in Physics from his time at the ETH. He also was in contact with many of the leading minds in Physics of his time.
As to Einstein’s resistance to dogma, it should be noted that the “scientific community” embraced his work at the time. It was an answer to some perplexing problems that had arisen in both astronomy and physics. The resistance to his ideas came primarily from physicists of the “old guard”, who were already being “beaten down” by physicists like Max Planck.
Einstein’s inability to find a teaching position following his graduation from ETH Zurich had nothing to do with his theories - which he had not formulated at the time - and everything to do with national politics and the shortage of academic positions.
Bill Gates is another “self-taught” wunderkind, but I’d hesitate to call him a “Google PhD”. To be sure, he did impressive work in building what has become the Microsoft Corporation, but his genius appears to have been in organization and planning, rather than in any technical arena. Also, it should be pointed out that the field he was “studying” - computer software - was not being taught in any relevant way in universities at the time.
I’d be interested in how you think that the “respectable autism research community” has “failed the families”. If you are referring to the benighted days of Bettleheim’s “Refrigerator Mother” hypothesis, I’d have to say that is pretty much a historical complaint. If you’re alluding to the failure to find “the” cause of autism or a “cure”, then the same can be said of a number of disorders and disabilities.
For that matter, the “alternative” autism research community has ALSO failed the families, and failed them in a more hurtful way. Rather than tell the families “We don’t know what causes autism and we have no cures to offer” (i.e. “the truth”), they have repeatedly offered various and sundry causes and cures, many of which have - in the end - proved false (the remainder are “unproven”). They have stirred up false hope and made false accusations of conspiracy, corruption and cover-up. In the end, they have done more to HARM families of autistic children and to drive truly gifted people away from autism research.
Your comments on Dr. Swedo are interesting, but do not bear on the first part of your reply. Dr. Swedo is educated, trained and experienced in her field. She is neither a “Google PhD” nor an “outsider”. Her appointment is a recognition of the fact that autism is not a “behavioral” problem, it is a neurological issue - a point I have made repeatedly. Whether or not I agree with all that Dr. Swedo says, I agree with the move toward a more biological view of autism.
Again, if you do not feel that you need some help understanding the scientific literature, feel free to skip this series of posts. If you doubt my ability to explain how to interpret scientific literature, that is your perogative - I do not intend to try to impress you with my credentials. If you are offended that an anonymous writer would presume to challenge your opinions, that is YOUR problem.
Prometheus
May 29th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
“In that case, you might also ask how a 13-year-old boy would know so much about biology.”
Dear Prometheus — while off-hand I don’t know of any biology prodigies, I do recall that J. Robert Oppenheimer by that age had published several papers and made presentations to leading experts, on various subjects concerning the geology of the lower Hudson Valley and NYC area. It’s the quality of the work, not the age of the author, that’s important.
May 31st, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Something tells me Raj is out of ideas.
June 10th, 2008 at 9:25 am
I don’t hear of too many people believing they have “special competency” in finance, business, plumbing or car repair. … ask a plumber or mechanic what part of his business comes from fixing things after the DIYer tried his expertise. And ask a stockbroker how many of his physician clients lose money when investing on their own.
June 10th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
Adding - Fabulous analysis of what a technical paper should and should not have.
June 10th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Tsu Dho Nimh,
Very good point! So the people who are trying the “biomedical” therapies on their own children are DIYers!
This would explain a cryptic comment I once heard from a family physician (muttered under his breath):
“If all the people who tried to be their own doctor were laid end-to-end, nobody would be the slightest bit surprised.”
Prometheus